Faking a status bar for iOS upgrades on macOS

Apple macOS users put up with all kinds of quirks in order to simplify the computing experience when compared to Microsoft Windows. I enjoy most of them, but the screenshot below is the one that pushes me over the edge. There is no longer a status bar or a percentage visualization to show the progress of downloading an iOS update.

Why oh why has Apple removed status bars!

In this case I’ve connected my iPhone to macOS via Lightning to USB cable and I have asked macOS to update the iPhone to the latest version. The result is a tiny spinning arrow and a sentence indicating something is happening. I grew tired of watching the spinning arrow and wanted to know what was taking so long. Here’s one method for getting a bit more detail:

Open Terminal

copy and paste the following:

while true
do
ls -lhrt ~/Library/iTunes/iPhone\ Software\ Updates
sleep 20
done

After pressing Return key, every 20 seconds, you’ll see a new entry that illustrates how much of the file has been downloaded :

The Total value is growing larger

When you’re done with this information press CONTROL + Z to end the process.

If you’d like to see this for iPad OS change the command to the following:

while true
do
ls -lhrt ~/Library/iTunes/iPad\ Software\ Updates
sleep 20
done

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